He gave the street another quick scan. Not a soul was looking his way. Over his career he’d found they never were. Seagraves waited patiently until the target walked through his crosshairs for the last time, then his gloved finger edged to the trigger. He didn’t particularly like firing through a windowpane, though it wouldn’t interfere with the flight of the ordnance he was using.
Seagraves calmly laid down the rifle and peeled off his jumpsuit, exposing the D.C. police uniform underneath. He put on a matching hat he’d brought with him and marched down the stairs to the rear door. When he exited the building, he could hear the screams from across the street. Only nineteen seconds had passed since the shot; he knew because he’d counted the ticks off in his head. He now moved rapidly down the street as he continued to time the action in his head. The next moment he heard the powerful whine of the car engine as the carefully choreographed scene was played out. Now he began to run all out, pulling his pistol as he did so. He had five seconds to get there. He turned the corner in time to almost be hit by the sedan as it raced by him. At the last instant he leaped to the side, rolled and came up in the middle of the road.
People across the street shouted at him, pointing at the car. He turned, gripped his gun with both hands and fired at the sedan. The blanks in his gun sounded sweet, just like the real thing. He placed five shots and then sprinted hard down the asphalt for half a block and slid into what appeared to be an unmarked police cruiser parked there; it raced after the fast-disappearing sedan, its siren blaring and grille lights flashing.
The car it was “chasing” turned left at the next intersection, then right, and headed down an alley, stopping in the middle. The driver in the car jumped out, ran to the lime-green VW Beetle parked in front of his in the alley and drove off.
Once out of sight of the club, the other car’s grille lights and siren stopped as it peeled away from the hunt and headed in the opposite direction. The man next to Seagraves never once looked at him as he climbed into the backseat and stripped off the police uniform. Underneath the cop clothes he wore a tight-fitting one-piece jogging outfit; black sneakers were already on his feet. In the floorboard of the car was a muzzled six-month-old black Lab. The car whipped down a side street and turned left at the next corner, stopping beside a park deserted at this late hour. The back door opened, Seagraves climbed out and the car sped off.
Seagraves held the leash tightly as he and his “pet” commenced their “nightly” jog. When they turned right at the next corner, four police cruisers flew past the pair. Not one face in the cop convoy even glanced at him.
A minute later, in another part of the city, a fireball raced into the sky. It was the rented and fortunately empty town house of the dead man. Initially, it would be blamed on a gas leak that had ignited. Yet combined with the murder of Bob Bradley, the federal authorities would seek out other explanations, though they wouldn’t come easily.
After running for three blocks Seagraves abandoned his pet, a waiting car was climbed into and he was back at his home less than an hour later. Meanwhile, the United States government would have to find another Speaker of the House to replace the recently deceased Robert “Bob” Bradley.
He strode through the front door of the sprawling building in Langley, Virginia, passed through additional security gauntlets and then headed to his eight-by-ten-foot cluttered cookie-cutter office. He was currently a midlevel bureaucrat whose main work consisted of being a liaison between his agency and the incompetent and brainless on Capitol Hill who’d somehow been voted into office. It was not nearly as taxing as his old job here, and represented a bone thrown his way for meritorious service. Now, unlike decades ago, the CIA let its “special” employees come in from the cold once they’d reached the age where reflexes slowed a bit and enthusiasm for the work diminished.
As Seagraves looked over some tedious paperwork, he realized how much he’d missed the killing. He supposed people who had once murdered for a living never really got over that bloodlust. At least last night had given him a bit of the old glory back.
That was one problem out of the way, but another one would probably soon take its place. Yet Roger Seagraves was a creative troubleshooter. It was just his nature.
CHAPTER 2
GREAT BELCHES OF BLACK smoke—probably packed with enough carcinogens to vanquish an unsuspecting generation or two—were propelled from ancient brick factory stacks into a sky already dark with rain clouds. In an alleyway of this industrial town that was dying an irreversible death due to penny wages paid in far more polluted cities in China, a small crowd had gathered around one man. This was not a crime scene with a dead body, or a street Shakespeare honing his acting chops, or even a big-lunged preacher hawking Jesus and redemption for a modest contribution to the cause. This man was known in the trade as a “broad tosser,” and he was doing his best to relieve the crowd of its money in a game of chance called three-card monte.
The “shills” supporting the tosser were adequate as they won staged betting rounds at timed intervals to keep the marks hopeful for their own streak of luck. The “wall man,” or lookout, was a bit lethargic. At least the woman watching them from across the street deduced this from his body language and listless eyes. She didn’t know the “muscle” that was also part of this con team, yet he didn’t look overly tough, just doughy and slow. The two “ropers” were young and energetic and, as their title implied, it was their job to keep a steady supply of innocents coming to play a card game they would never win.
She moved closer, watching as the enthusiastic crowd alternately clapped and groaned as bets were won and lost. She’d started her career as a shill for one of the country’s best tossers. That particular con could run a table in virtually any city and walk away an hour later with at least two grand in his pocket, the marks having no idea they’d been the victim of anything more than poor luck. This tosser was excellent and for good reason: He’d been trained by the same man as she. To her informed eye he was using the double-card queen-up-front technique that would substitute the back card for the queen at the critical moment of delivery, for this was the entire key to the game.
The simple object of three-card monte, like the shell game it was based on, was to pick the queen from the trio on the table after the tosser had mixed them around with blurring speed. That was impossible to do if the lady wasn’t even on the table at the time the guess was made. Then a second before the queen’s “correct” position was revealed, the tosser would smoothly replace one of the cards with the queen and show the group where it had supposedly been all the time. This simple “short con” had lifted money from marquises and marines and everything in between for as long as playing cards had been around.
